Jewish communities in North Africa & the Arab world: new web resource

'Diarna' is Judeo-Arabic for 'our homes' and this new web project gathers multimedia resources such as videos, digital images and oral histories of the Jewish communities of the Arab world, from North Africa to Iran.

Archive material is drawn in part from the Alliance Israelite Universelle and the Beit Hatfusot (Museum of the Jewish People)

Click on the link below :

Diarna : mapping Mizrahi heritage

The Bible and mythology

An article from the online LaCross Tribune examines how the ancient Israelites may have expressed their own theology through an adaptation of the Mesopotamian creation story in their own Book of Genesis

New resource for Coptic studies

The website Coptica gives access to over 100 digitized texts of European studies on Coptic language and literature dating from the 19th century onward. Some of the texts are hosted by different collections such as the Internet Archive.
There are over 30 texts on ancient and Oriental Christianity, including Manichaeism
The website has been created by Pierre Cherix of the University of Geneva

Places left on Library resources session

There are places left on the last Information Skills session for the Study of Religions, which is taking place this Thursday (17th November) between 3 and 4 p.m. in Room E17 (Library)

If you would like to attend, please email ms28@soas.ac.uk and also let me know if there are any topics you particularly want to discuss

If you cannot  make the 17th November and have any queries relating to Library resources, please do not hesitate to contact me

Hajj and Eid al-Adha 2011

An excellent photo essay from Atlantic Magazine online looks at this year's Hajj pilgrimage and celebrations of Eid al-Adha across the globe

Islamic art in New York

The new galleries of Islamic art at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art have just re-opened following a renovation which began in 2003.
This article in the New York Times reviews the new galleries

"The art itself, some 1,200 works spanning more than 1,000 years, is beyond fabulous. An immense cultural vista — necessary, liberating, intoxicatingly pleasurable — has been restored to the city."

Piecing together the Cairo Genizah: new technology aims to reunite fragments

The American Friends of Tel Aviv University report on a project currently underway at Tel Aviv University to piece together digitally the fragments from the Cairo Genizah that are currently scattered among 70 institutions worldwide, including Cambridge, Jerusalem and New York
Visit their website to find out more about this project, that involves using technology based on facial recognition software to identity digitized fragments belonging to the same text